


the girl is a galaxy

by locationist



Category: NCT (Band), fromis_9 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 04:29:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16381412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/locationist/pseuds/locationist
Summary: Some days Gyuri's too much and some days Gyuri's too little.





	the girl is a galaxy

Gyuri's a fucking realist.

Jaehyun has this sputtering motorbike that he rides to class and he lets Gyuri sit behind him, gripping the back of the seat with the extra helmet that they'd bought off Amazon with straps a little too small because they accidentally got the kid size on top of her head. One day, Jaehyun swears, she's going to fall off and smash her skull on the pavement right before they get to the parking lot and he's going to have to live with the guilt of killing her.

When he tells her as much she just shrugs. "You think I don't know," she deadpans, in her very Gyuri way. Jaehyun can't distinguish if she's telling a joke or really just that nonchalant.

Sometimes Jaehyun falls asleep at night thinking about the warmth of her inner thighs through her light-wash jeans faintly pressed against his sides, the humming engine of the motorbike beneath them matching the uneven thrumming of his heart.

Gyuri's got these eyes that are so dark that the iris nearly blends into the pupil. It makes every look she gives him, punctuating all her deadpan statements, heavier than she means them to be. At the same time, Gyuri's grown out of the habit of disclaiming everything she says with a _you know I'm kidding, right?_ Jaehyun lets his mind fill in the small silences between her words with it in its absence.

Like when he switches from studying astrophysics to writing about the stars instead, and quits his old part-time lab research because of it: "I hope you get used to starving," is what Jaehyun thinks she says - or something along those lines - with a shrug, in her very Gyuri way, her dark eyes looking into his from where she was chewing her cereal, no disclaimer trailing after it.

He puts it there for her. "I know you're kidding," and she goes back to her tax law, rubbing her nose, still chewing that cereal.

Two months later, in the midst of a record hot August and three final papers for his summer term, Jaehyun's got his head on the dining table, laptop fan whirring so loud it's giving him a headache, and feels Gyuri's lips brush over his sticky neck, the junction right where his spine juts out, exposed by the free tank he got from the gym his freshman year, washed so often that it's paper thin.

"Go to sleep," she whispers, even though Jaehyun knows she's looking over to read what he's written. And he does, to the cadence of her even breathing against his cheek and the ends of her long hair tickling his right wrist.

Sometimes, major change aside, Gyuri still asks him about the universe.

"It's all very fascinating to me," is what she says on the rare days he asks _why?_ , and she's always slightly defensive and insulted by his curiosity in her curiosity.

Jaehyun always laughs and pinches her ear at that. "I think it's cute," he insists when she bristles more.

Unfortunately, due to the major change, Jaehyun has to start rationing his facts so he won't run out of things to tell her. It's been five months into becoming a Lit major and two months of repeatedly talking about the relativity of black holes. Jaehyun knows she must know but Gyuri still hasn't called him out on it.

"What is this," Jaehyun says one night when they're lying on his bed, facing each other. Her dark eyes are starting to soften with sleepiness and she _hmm's_ in the place of an actual question. He reaches to graze her cupid's bow with the hook of his index finger. "A fairy tale for a Business major?"

She catches it with her teeth, biting down not seriously enough to leave marks, and laughs when he pulls it away. "Maybe," she whisper-smiles in her very Gyuri way, sans the shrug, before she closes her eyes completely.

Jaehyun doesn't fall asleep for a good hour, watching as the night kisses the bridge of her nose in shadow, as the blue light of the moon through his not-completely-drawn curtain traces the gentle slope of her shoulders and hips, tapering off at where her feet dig into his blankets. When he wakes up, her eyelids are fluttering like the twinkling of far away stars.

And Gyuri's not really a prude, but she's not really in the mood to have sex often either. "Mmm," she mumbles against Jaehyun's lips one afternoon after they've been making out on-and-off for about an hour. "I think you bent the pages of my book," and her chest vibrates with a bubbling kind of laughter, so light from where she's pressed beneath Jaehyun's weight that he can feel it in his own ribs.

The book and whether its pages are flat or not are the least of Jaehyun's concerns, but Gyuri swats him away to even them out. He sits there on the couch, watching her kneel and press down the pages, resisting the urge to reach into his pants and relieve his erection.

Gyuri's got this thing they label "fragile femininity" but they speak so little of it explicitly that Jaehyun can't remember if she coined this term aloud or if they both have some shared idea of it in their separate minds but refer to it in different terms. "I don't know," Gyuri tells him the first time they make up after a big fight, fiddling with the frayed tag of one of his apartment mate's pillows, avoiding eye contact. "Sometimes I just have this." She pauses, trying to search for the right word. "Feeling? Where I don't want to give you things. Things I know you want."

Jaehyun stretches out his legs so he can touch the ends of her toes with his. Hers are freezing cold, toenails cut uneven. "Is it because you don't want the things I want?"

Gyuri ducks her head further down into the curtain of her hair. Her fingers falter on the tag. "I don't know," she admits, and it sounds like she's gurgling nothing less than an ocean in her throat.

"I don't know," is also what she pants when they have sex for the second time, her bare thighs from where Jaehyun's pushed up her sundress straddling him as their hips move in tandem, and Jaehyun asks if she wants to move this to the bedroom. Is what she screams when they fight again, and Jaehyun asks if she really wants to break up with him like she swore she did five minutes ago. Is what she repeats back to him when she asks him the same question the next time the arguing gets bad, and Jaehyun, drenched in the cold of imagining her legs not sprawled over his after a night of her tossing and turning and stealing the blankets beside him, realizes she's come to the same realization.

Some days Gyuri's too much and some days Gyuri's too little. It's not like Jaehyun is simple in comparison because he's sure he drives her just as nuts as she drives him sometimes, but sometimes instead of getting angry at the way she tells him not to buy her a new helmet for her birthday in favor of getting treated to a good dinner, instead of leaving her sitting on his couch for a walk at 3AM to clear his head after she tells him a truth he doesn't want to hear, Gyuri will smile that eye-crinkling smile of hers and reach for his fingers, tangling them with her own, and they'll be just enough.

It's these moments Jaehyun writes about. In that document that Gyuri craned over him to read in August, in some of the dreams he has when she's sleeping beside him and when she's not, begun but not yet finished:

The girl is a galaxy, this story starts, not so much a love story as a fairy tale for Business majors.

_The girl is a galaxy._

 


End file.
